Agonizing Discussion: A Key to Biblical Interpretation

What if you discovered that the Bible’s intertextuality, that is, its conversation with itself, could produce uncertainty rather than clarity?  Clarity is the cornerstone of evangelical biblical interpretation, but I think it represses some glaring realities within the Bible.

Consider the juxtaposition of Psalm 8 with Job 39.  Psalm 8 contains verses that support the notion of stewardship.  God gave humankind the privilege and responsibility to rule over the animals in his world.  Psalm 8:6-7 says, “You make him to rule over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field.”

However, in Job 39, a different picture appears.  God, in the so-called “divine speeches”, says, “Will the wild ox consent to serve you, or will he spend the night at your manger? Can you bind the wild ox in a furrow with ropes, or will he harrow the valleys after you?  Will you trust him because his strength is great and leave your labor to him?  Will you have faith in him that he will return your grain and gather it from your threshing floor (39:9-12)?”

Psalm 8 is an affirmation of the human domestication of animals, Job 39 a seeming mocking of it.  Carol Newsom, in The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations, says, “Similarly, the wild ox is represented in such a way as to mock the logic of domestication (246).” So the question arises: does or does God not intend for humans to serve as stewards of his creation?  The clarity of Scripture, a doctrine which conservative scholars cherish, struggles to reconcile these two passages.  And these two passages are the tip of the iceberg of the interpretive difficulties when reading Psalms alongside Job.

I have no advice for those who cling to an interpretive model which presupposes the clarity of Scripture.  I feel your pain, because I once was there.  Yet, after extensive study of the Bible, I cannot read it in such a restrictive way anymore.  The Bible, as I see it, engenders discussion and ambiguity much, much more often than it does clarity.  I do not see this as a weakness.  Discussion in the presence of uncertainty can produce wisdom.  If you’re after being doctrinally correct, clarity is what you’ll require.  If wisdom, agonizing discussion.